S-P-A-M #7 - Escaping Winter but not Semantics

Is it Math or Maths ?? 🦊

Hello from sunny Dubai! 👋☀😎

This will be a light lift¹ as family time, sunny promenade walks, dates with beautiful girls, swimming and some sightseeing puts “laptop stuff” in the back seat.

Sickkk views over Dubai Marina

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🕳 Random Rabbit Hole

Semantic Enigma – the not-so-plural “s”

Math or Maths? Sport or Sports? Let’s look into this a bit…

Mathematics is a tricky word. It fits both definitions of a mass noun at once: a broad type of inquiry “the abstract science of number, quantity and space” AND a bundle of countable disciplines (e.g. geometry, trigonometry, algebra). Either way it prefers singular verbs.

The singular noun mathematic entered the lexicon in the 14th century, but in the 17th century many fields of study starting acquiring a seemingly plural form (e.g. physics, acoustics and economics, but not arithmetic). And then from the 19th century each country separately developed their shortened version.

It seems like there’s no right or wrong, and the “English came from England” argument won’t be helping us this time. 😂

Note: I liked a comment somewhere that said the S on the end of maths allows the tongue to reposition itself, making the word easier to use in sentences/speech.

The case with sports isn’t as perplexing as with maths… In old British, sports was an adjective (e.g. sports day) whereas sport, like today, was the (uncountable) noun describing the overall concept; in North America it’s mostly sports.

But they seem to be increasingly interchangeable everywhere, so let’s all just be good sports about it and forget this one. 😅⚽🏈²

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💡 Critical Thinking

Biases – Availability

The availability bias (a.k.a. availability heuristic or recency bias) is our tendency to make judgments based on information that is more easily recalled.

When a piece of information or a certain experience is easily brought to mind, we incorrectly assume that it’s an accurate reflection of reality. This cognitive bias often leads to the illusion of rational thinking and, ultimately, to bad decisions.

This bias appears in every aspect of our life — from financial decisions (e.g. thinking we’re much better at stocks trading than we actually are, because we remember our good profit-making decisions more clearly than our loss-making ones), to even things like entertainment (e.g. thinking a football player is better at free kicks than they factually are, because we remember that 1 amazing goal much more vividly than the 70+ they missed badly before it³) — so we’d all benefit by reminding ourselves of it and doing more self-reflection and deliberate brainstorming to not be swayed by it.

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🎶 Music & Art

A warm reminder to take things in life easy 😉

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😈 Devil’s Word of the Week

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Replica, n. – A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original. It is so called to distinguish it from a “copy,” which is made by another artist. When the two are made with equal skill the replica is more valuable, for it is supposed to be more beautiful than it looks.

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Let me know what you found interesting today, or other thingS you’d like me to write about.

Till next week!

Prince 🦊

If this wasn’t your cup of tea but know a friend who likes this kind of, erm, tea, please consider sharing :)

1. Shout-out to the lovely

Louie Bacaj

and

Chris Wong

for teaching us about these 📢

2. It’s never “soccer” tho 🙄

3. Yes, I was thinking about Cris Ronaldo when writing this but it applies to everyone.